It's almost as if I feel I have to be on the boat to post to this; not really a conscious thing, but it seems that way... I'm back on Tortoise, ready for a week off work (well deserved, after the last two weeks) and a trip down the Thames. It's a shame not to be seeing the upper Thames while I'm here (the idea behind the diversions up the Ashby & Caldon branches), but time has just ran out on me, really. Not that I was ever behind schedule, there never was a schedule. There will, after all, be a next time.

It's two buses from work to here, albeit with a reasonable walk each end. Some of that time was passed listening to Stephen Fry's podcasts I was told about at work today, which include a quite passionately moving polemic about my own dear employer. Also in there, though, was a comment about how a straw poll of student posters showed a change in heroes, and therefore attitudes - from politicians (Marx, Guevara, Lenin) to thinkers (Wilde, Einstein) - from doers to dreamers, if you like, although using dreamer in the most positive way. The latter as heroes is no bad thing, but it does reflect how things have changed more widely, too - from making things, to selling ideas, or at beast selling things that other people have made. The latter of course is what capitalism is built on, I know, but I digress (something that Stephen Fry does so much better than I).

A recent conversation with a friend who's (mostly honme educated) son has just left home for university to do pure maths, a passion of hers, too, preferring the beauty of pure numbers to their practical application, as I did, in electronics, or physics. That's often a thing I find, in amongst thinkers & creative people - I'm the more practical one, with tangible solutions - but also being able to do it rather than 'someone should...'. With both the PA system and work projects (like the last two weeks) - I'm the last link in the chain, no-one left to delegate too - if something needs doing, I do it, rather than wishing someone else would.

I'm bundling together a few confused ideas here, in part celebrating how everyone's different, but also wishing there were a few more doers out there as well as the dreamers. There's space for us all.